Once Upon A Time star Lana Parilla reveals she was once homeless early in her career: ‘It terrifies me still to this day’

Lana Parilla has admitted that she was once homeless for several months when she was a struggling actress.

During her appearance on Tuesday’s episode of Tommy DiDario’s I’ve never said this before podcast, the 46-year-old film and television actress said her fear of becoming homeless again had stuck with her ever since.

“There’s always a little part of me, in the back of my mind, that says, ‘Oh my God, never stop working so hard,'” Lana said to conclude her confession.

“I was homeless for two months and living in a car,” she said. “I just never want to end up there again.”

The Once Upon A Time star, who appears alongside Jennifer Lopez in Netflix’s critically panned sci-fi thriller Atlas, said her time without a stable living situation “forces” her to “be more creative and find new ways to make money and everything to find’. these different ways of developing projects and doing your own thing and hiring all these new talents.”

Lana further revealed that she was still a teenager when she became homeless.

‘There was a time when I was living on my own early in my career – which was very early – when I was about 19 years old. It was a very difficult time,” she recalls.

Homelessness can take multiple forms, from living out of the car to couch surfing to living on the streets, but the Spin City star did not make it clear what her situation was like at the time, which would have been around the mid-1990s.

“My family and I were in different places, and I was kind of left alone,” she continued. “It was very difficult to make a living and, you know, pursue a dream, and at the same time try to get an education.”

Lana admitted that at the time she “couldn’t do everything on her own.”

“I had to drop out of college, which broke my heart,” she continued. “I had to figure out how to make more money to support myself.”

Then the fear of losing everything that haunted Lana after she was homeless took hold of her again.

‘It still scares me to this day. That could one day become a reality for us as artists…” she said as she walked away.

‘There was a time when I was living on my own early in my career – which was very early – when I was about 19 years old. It was a very difficult time,” she recalls; depicted on Once Upon A Time

“My family and I were in different places, and I was kind of left alone,” she continued. “It was very difficult to make a living and, you know, pursue a dream, and at the same time try to get an education.”

Lana added that the idea of ​​being homeless “still terrifies me to this day,” adding that “it’s much scarier to imagine being at 46, rather than age 19; seen with Ginnifer Goodwin in Once Upon A Time

Although it was decades behind her at this point and she’s had several big acting jobs since then, the specter of homelessness was even more terrifying now. Although she is now much more confident in her career, someone her age may not be able to recover as well as she did as a teenager.

“At 19 it’s different, but at 46 it’s a lot scarier,” Lana added.

Just a few years after saying she was homeless, Lana starred in season four of the Michael J. Fox film Spin City, and her career hasn’t slowed down since.

In addition to collaborating with Jennifer Lopez on her new streaming film Atlas, Lana scored a recurring role on The Lincoln Lawyer last year, and recently appeared in the well-received One Of The Good Ones, a new play that premiered at the Pasadena Playhouse. and completed its run in April